By ANN WHITCHER-GENTZKE

“Certainly, archival work has changed in the technical ways we do our jobs.”

Archivist Amy Vilz

Amy Vilz had that “aha” moment about her
life’s work when she entered University Archives to interview
as a student assistant. Having just completed her first semester in
UB’s MLS degree program, Vilz had a vague inkling she might
like archival work, but was uncertain of her focus except that she
loved history and historical research. “Sometimes in life, if
you’re lucky, things just click and you think, ‘this is
it,’” says Vilz of her introduction to the archives as
a graduate student.

Nearly a decade later, Vilz is back in 420 Capen, where the
archives are housed, this time as the university archivist,
succeeding John Edens who retired in 2012. After receiving her MLS
degree in 2006, Vilz held archival positions at RIT, the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery and most recently at D’Youville
College, where she was the school’s archivist. Hired in
January, she is still settling into her position, learning about
the “huge” collection of official records and
publications, faculty papers and array of manuscripts, photographs
and other materials relating to UB’s history stretching back
to the mid-19th century.

Vilz is quick to dispel notions that archives are dusty enclaves
far from the public eye. While it’s true that archival
collections have special rules intended to safeguard the valuable
and fragile materials inside, Vilz says they are better conceived
as repositories of living history. “I do think we could do a
better job at explaining why we do all the things we do,” she
says. “So that it doesn’t feel like an arbitrary,
‘What do you mean, I can’t use a pen?’
‘Well, because pens can leak and if the ink gets on a
document, it’s damaged irretrievably.’

“Moving forward, I think we can counteract misconceptions
about archival work in the ways that we collect materials. In the
past few years, there has been a movement to ask patrons, students,
alumni and community members to help archivists describe their
collections. So, for example, all archives have photos that are
unidentified with people and events. A lot of times we can narrow
the time period down to about 10 years because of clothing styles.
But it would be nice to have alumni, students and faculty, and
emeritus faculty who could say, ‘I know exactly who this
person is. I know exactly what this event is.’”

A Buffalo native who also holds a BA in history from UB, Vilz is
still getting her arms around the archives’ vast holdings.
“It’s a massive collection in terms of size and the
breadth of what it covers,” she says. Along with records of
university organizations and all sorts of campus publications, Vilz
and her staff collect UB-related ephemera and memorabilia.
“The other parts of our collection are what we refer to as
manuscript collections. And those are more community-based
collections, so there are several topic areas, including the
environment, labor and design.”

Vilz is especially excited about the design holdings, as she
enjoyed working on a graphic design collection while at RIT.
“We’ve been working very closely with the School of
Architecture and Planning in getting more material related to
design and architecture to expand that area within the manuscript
collections.” Among the design holdings are materials
relating to UB’s long association with Frank Lloyd Wright and
his Darwin D. Martin House, along with several collections of
William Huff, emeritus professor of architecture, who studied and
worked with famed architect Louis Kahn.

Indeed, holdings in the UB Archives often reflect the range of
interests of those with UB connections. Sometimes the resulting
archival materials—and how they got here—are a bit
quirky in nature. Take the radio scripts from “The Lone
Ranger” and “The Green Hornet” donated by their
author Fran Striker (1903-1962), who was from Buffalo and who gave
his papers to the university. Other collections may relate to
community interests but usually have a connection with UB and its
educational mission. So, for example, the Archives’ Love
Canal holdings originated with the research of Adeline Levine,
emeritus professor of sociology. Today, they continue to be
consulted by a wide public. “The Love Canal materials are
still very relevant to people,” Vilz says.

In another example of audience outreach, Vilz points with pride
to recent digitization of an oral history audio archive created by
Archivist Emerita Shonnie Finnegan and her staff in the late 1970s.
Consisting of 40 taped interviews with UB people from an array of
fields and associations, this valuable archive was previously only
available to those who could come to 420 Capen and listen to the
tape cassettes on old tape players (they originally were recorded
reel-to-reel). Now, anyone can listen online to these
ethnographic-style interviews that include the voices and
reminiscences of such figures as Joseph Manch (1910-1988), a member
of the UB Council and longtime Buffalo Public Schools
superintendent; Harriet Montague (1905-1997), a UB professor of
mathematics at a time when very few women held such a position; and
Mischa Schneider (1904-1985), the great cellist whose Budapest
String Quartet played the Slee Beethoven Cycle for many years. All
40 interviews are accessible online.

Vilz now wants to replicate the oral history project with
interviews of key figures who can “fill in the gaps”
among records of certain time periods. “We really want to get
at people who are well-known in the university,” she says.
“But we also want to interview the lesser-known folks who can
offer some insights into working here during a certain period of
time, or over a course of time, or speak to their personal
experiences,” she says. What’s most desirable, Vilz
explains, is to ferret out the individual observations and
impressions of key events. “You can read about what the
university was like, say, during the campus unrest in the late
’60s and early ’70s. But it’s very different when
you hear somebody speak about being there.”

Vilz acknowledges that archival work is increasingly a process
of digitization and online presentation. Yet much of the
archivist’s art involves the ongoing lessons as orally
conveyed from one archivist to another. “Certainly, archival
work has changed in the technical ways we do our jobs,” Vilz
says. “Previously, I think it was kind of a closed system
that scholars and researchers talked about among themselves.
Whereas now, we try to be more transparent and put online what we
have, either in descriptions or in digitizing images. But in other
ways our work hasn’t changed. I think apprenticeship and
mentorship are still very important—what you can hand off
verbally from archivist to archivist. And those are things that I
don’t think will change, even if the manner in which we do
our job does change.”